Tuesday, January 22, 2013

They Call It "The Point of No Return" Study

Prepared by the consultancy firm EcoFys, the study lists 14-major projects that will increase global greenhouse gas emissions by a civilization-wrecking 20%. That's where the "point of no return" part comes in.

The largest contributors will be China's five north-western
provinces, which aim to increase coal production by 620m tonnes by 2015,
generating an additional 1.4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Australia's
burgeoning coal export industry, already the largest in the world, is
in second place due to its potential growth to 408m tonnes of shipped
resource a year by 2025, resulting in an annual 760m tonnes of CO2.

Meanwhile, controversial exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic could release 520m tonnes of CO2
a year, with further major emissions set to flow from other new fossil
fuel frontiers, such as tar sands oil in Canada and shale gas in the US.

The EcoFys report is quite blunt: ...a handful of governments and a small number ofcompanies in the fossil fuel industry are pushing theseprojects, apparently without a care about the climateconsequences. In November 2012, the IEA said in itsannual World Energy Outlook that no more than one-thirdof the carbon contained in the proven reserves of fossilfuels can be released into the atmosphere by 2050 ifthe world is to achieve the 2°C goal.8 The developmentof these new coal, oil and gas projects would come ata time when climate scientists are increasingly linkingalarming extreme weather events to climate change.9These extreme weather events include Hurricane Sandyin October 201210, droughts in the US in 201211 and201112, heat waves and forest fires in Russia in 201013,and the European heat wave in 2003 that killed tens ofthousands14. The disasters the world is experiencingnow are happening at a time when the average globaltemperature has increased by 0.8ºC15, and they arejust a taste of our future if greenhouse gas emissionscontinue to balloon....The huge gap between what governments say they aredoing to prevent catastrophic climate change and whatthey are actually doing is most evident with these 14projects. The governments that have approved them haveall agreed that the global average temperature must bekept below 2°C.

If the governments supporting the projects in this reporthelp push the world past the point of no return, thegreat irony will be that the resulting climate chaos waspreventable. The technology for avoiding the emissionsfrom these projects and for reducing overall globalemissions exists right now....The world is clearly at a Point of No Return: either replacecoal, oil and gas with renewable energy, or face a futureturned upside down by climate change.
The report is an indictment of the petro-politics in Canada's Parliament, Conservative, Liberal and New Democrat alike.

Hey Owen. Can you imagine two people having this discussion ten years ago? We'd be considered lunatics, nutters. Yet this is now entering the mainstream in organizations like Chatham House, the Royal Society, NASA, NOAA, NCAR and so many other blue-ribbon institutions. Yet somehow it bypassed our political institutions, those which we empower with all the resources needed to respond to these threats.

I haven't been posting much lately. I have been writing as much as ever but most of the stuff I don't post, leaving it in draft, because it's just too dismal.

The best science today gives us until 2020 (some like Hansen say 2015) for global emissions to peak and then begin very sharp reductions. Just to cap emissions takes years of planning, investing and legislating. It requires an unprecedented degree of international coordination. Yet, as the report shows, all the big emissions players - China, the U.S., Australia, Canada and a few others - are going full bore in the opposite direction.

Just a couple of days ago Environment Canada announced that frequent extreme weather events were the new normal for our own country. And we're still just nudging past the top of this climate roller-coaster. More to the point, Canada is actually much better off than so many other parts of this world.